Walter crouches over the dead sailors and begins going through their clothes. He is mumbling to himself, a disappointed burr. There are some coins in a pouch around Cobham’s neck that he keeps for himself, three knives of inferior quality that he leaves on the deck for anyone to take, which Katherine does, and a pouch in which one of the men kept the wooden beads of his rosary. Thomas watches in silence.

He has killed a man. More than one. He understands he has done it to save himself, and Katherine, but he can smell their blood on his hands, and on his boots, like a stain on his soul.

‘You there, servant! Lend a hand here.’

Walter is standing holding Saxby’s heels. He wants Thomas to take the shoulders. Thomas stands and grasps the mate’s leather jerkin and lifts, and together they swing the body towards the side.

‘Should we not say the viaticum?’ Thomas asks. The thought of even a man like Saxby going to heaven or hell without some blessing and prayers is shocking. When a canon or a sister died, the prayers lasted three days.

Walter looks at him as if he is a simpleton.

‘No,’ he says.

And that is that. They swing Saxby over and let him go. Thomas watches his body splash into the sea. Then Walter calls and Thomas returns to collect the others and together they bundle their corpses over the ship’s rail. Thomas murmurs a blessing each time, and as the men go over they are just meat, more solid in death than they had been in life. One of the remaining sailors climbs the ratlines to the mast. A moment later the boy’s loose-limbed body tumbles down, catches on the stays with a fumbling bounce, and then goes over the side with a small splash.

‘Only a lad,’ Fakenham says, peering after him. ‘Shame.’

The sailors start hauling in the flapping sails and the ship stiffens under them and begins to make headway. The horizon steadies. Two more men from the balinger climb aboard and begin helping an older man up over the ship’s side. He is red-faced and snowy-haired, with a long grey feather in his blue velvet cap. He wears a fur-trimmed coat and on his feet very fine, muddy leather boots, which might once have been the colour of a polished conker. When he reaches the deck, he hobbles, as if in pain.

‘God’s nails,’ he mutters. There are tears in his pale blue eyes and he stands for a moment, swaying, as if he knows his next step will hurt, and he looks for the shortest route towards somewhere to sit.